I'm glad i watched this on BBC iPlayer and didn't waste a trip to the cinema. It was embarrassingly badly acted. The story line was promising but didn't deliver. The filming technique was disorientating and annoying. It was full of horror clichés but done badly. I didn't like the "unfriendly locals" stereotype. The Tech character was an excruciating caricature of a Tech bloke. It would have worked better if we could have seen the wires and the whole thing had been filmed as a spoof documentary.

Film-makers can't really win with stories of this sort. The plot moves along, the characters do their thing, and then tension gradually increases. But, in the end, we either have to be shown the monster (or whatever), or we don't. Either way, we go away disappointed. If we see the monster, then our reaction is (to paraphrase Stephen King) "Ugh! It's a 30-foot bug. But at least it's not a 300-foot bug!" If we don't see the monster, we're left wondering what on earth it was all about.Sometimes not showing us the monster can work; for example, the story might be cleverly ambiguous about whether there really is a monster at all. In this movie, however, we know there is a monster. And that makes the ending particularly lazy and inept because, if the film-makers aren't going to show us the monster whose existence has been increasingly strongly hinted at, the film has to offer us something else. But it doesn't -- it's just curtains down, at no particular point.Still, credit where it's due. The small cast of characters is convincingly written and portrayed well. The scenery/environment is engaging and atmospheric, and the church where a lot of the action takes place is creepy, but not unbelievably so. In fact, I enjoyed the movie right up until the last twenty minutes or so, when it became heart-sinkingly clear that there wasn't going to be any plot resolution.I don't mind a movie that leaves me wondering what happens next. What irks me is a movie in which it's patently obvious that even the writer had no idea what happens next, and probably didn't much care. On the whole, I'd rather have seen a 30-foot bug.

First of all I will state that I really, really… REALLY don't like "found- footage" movies and I don't deliberately seek out any of them to watch. That doesn't mean, however, that I'm automatically against every found-footage movie ever made, and I will always try to remain objective in my opinions if I do come across one. So, when I was on a business trip last week, I stayed in a hotel where "The Borderlands" was playing on the complementary free channel and watched it as much open-minded as possible. Well, I didn't like it… but at least it contains several strong and memorable aspects in comparison to other - and often far more successful - found-footage flicks, for example an intriguing background story and setting (the Catholic Church and a remote little parish in godforsaken England), identifiable characters (a cynical loner and a talkative Curious George) and cinematography that is not exaggeratedly annoying or headache-inducing. The latter is due to the fact that the protagonists – researchers working for the Vatican – are constantly obliged to wear headsets with integrated cameras, so the editing is a lot less hectic than in other found-footage movies and it occasionally even makes "The Borderlands" come across like a first-person-shooter video game. But then, unfortunately, the film still obviously remains a found footage horror movie and thus also features all the trademark flaws. It's basically a film in which absolutely nothing happens for about 95% of the running time, except for a whole lot of irrelevant gibberish and random padding footage. Then, there occur a few unclear horrific events in the blink of an eye – that remain unexplained of course – and then the film is done. Bam, just like that… "The Borderlands" distinguishes itself from the majority of found-footage movies because it nevertheless manages to gradually build up tension and because it features a couple of grisly "biblical" horror subjects, like stigmata etc., but you still need a lot of patience and tolerance to remain focused.

A pair of misfits investigates spooky goings on at an ancient church.Weirdly bad, with an incompetent intro sequence. The story is simple MR James stuff, but the setting just doesn't fit - a Vatican investigation of a church of England building with a congregation of zero? It reminds me of another embarrassing recent Brit horror set in ancient vaults, but I can't recall the title. To be honest, I don't want to.At one point I swear they called the parish priest Father Crillie - surely this was going somewhere funny? But no, the drama was deadly earnest and deadly dull, with weak attempts to inject character. And not a single female face. Failure of imagination. Sad to see the lead actor in this kind of production at his age.Cinematography was poor - no attempt at framing, everything in the middle of screen - but I liked the sound.